LTV > CPI: Games that print money

Last week João briefly discussed some acronyms that are common among the #gamedev community. Now I’ll dive deeper into two of them: CPI and LTV. These two have a direct impact on the ability games have to make money which is deeply important for any game company.

Let’s start with CPI, or Cost Per Install. It basically is how much you spend to bring one user to your game. Let’s say you pay the average $1 to bring one user directly from your advertisement, so if you spend $10 you will get 10 users. If that one user brings another friend to play your game, you spent $1 for two players, or $0,50 per player. That’s your eCPI (effective CPI), which is actually the best way to look at UA (user acquisition) costs because it considers organic users and virality, the ones you don’t pay for.

LTV means Life Time Value, the average money you make in your game for each user during the time they play it. Some people spend thousands of dollars, some people won’t spend a dime. Some people will play for 800 days straight, some people will abandon on the first day. Usually 20% of the users will bring 80% of your revenue. There are many ways to calculate LTV, but we use LTV = Average Revenue Per Daily Active User x Average Days Played.

In every business, if you can make more money selling your products than you spend on bringing new customers, you have good ROI (Return On Investment). If you get to make a game with a higher LTV than CPI (or eCPI), it means that you can invest money in user acquisition and make more money on top of it, fuelling a money making infinite loop, you made it.

Getting to this level requires a lot of work and there are only a few companies that get to that point at scale, usually the ones with games in the Top Grossing charts. We at Cupcake have a higher LTV than CPI. See you at the Top Grossing!